Towards Edge-Based Deep Learning in Industrial Internet of Things

As a typical application of the Internet of Things (IoT), the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) connects all the related IoT sensing and actuating devices ubiquitously so that the monitoring and control of numerous industrial systems can be realized. Deep learning, as one viable way to carry out big data-driven modeling and analysis, could be integrated in IIoT systems to aid the automation and intelligence of IIoT systems. As deep learning requires large computation power, it is commonly deployed in cloud servers. Thus, the data collected by IoT devices must be transmitted to the cloud for training process, contributing to network congestion and affecting the IoT network performance as well as the supported applications. To address this issue, in this paper we leverage fog/edge computing paradigm and propose an edge computing-based deep learning model, which utilizes edge computing to migrate the deep learning process from cloud servers to edge nodes, reducing data transmission demands in the IIoT network and mitigating network congestion. Since edge nodes have limited computation ability compared to servers, we design a mechanism to optimize the deep learning model so that its requirements for computational power can be reduced. To evaluate our proposed solution, we design a testbed implemented in the Google cloud and deploy the proposed Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model, utilizing a real-world IIoT dataset to evaluate our approach. Our experimental results confirm the effectiveness of our approach, which can not only reduce the network traffic overhead for IIoT, but also maintain the classification accuracy in comparison with several baseline schemes.